Customer contact centers handle large amounts of interaction between customers and one or more enterprises, such as companies or other organizations. For example, contact centers may provide centralized customer service and support functions. This interaction and customer service is often handled by contact center agents (live agents, for example, answering telephone calls, responding to e-mails, conducting live chats, making outbound calls, etc.) Contact centers may be very large, employing several hundred or even thousands of members in customer service, sales, and support functions. A single contact center may service many companies, for example, on an outsourced basis, allowing similar customer service work performed by the companies to be consolidated and run more efficiently.
Contact centers are often large offices staffed with representatives who either make or receive phone calls (such as with live agents), live chats, e-mails, etc. Depending on the size of the contact center, a single office could have less than a dozen representatives or more than 100 staff members (some contact centers have several thousand staff members). Some contact centers focus on answering inbound calls, such as a contact center for a bank that gives out a toll-free number for customers who need assistance. In this example, representatives may provide services such as giving account balances, answering questions about transactions, or taking loan applications over the phone. Other contact centers focus on outbound calls, such as contact centers for survey companies whose representatives make calls to ask people survey questions, or for telemarketing organizations, or for accounts receivable.
Live agents, however, have limitations, such as limited working hours, limited capacity (especially to conduct live assistance, e.g., may be limited to handling only one or a few customers at a time), limited knowledge levels or skill sets, etc., that make it impractical to guarantee, for example, that the same live agent is always available to assist a particular customer whenever that customer has a need to contact the contact center, or that the same answer is provided to different customers experiencing the same situation. Accordingly, customers using a contact center are often provided with inadequate, incorrect, or inconsistent information, frequently from a number of different live agents, and frequently with repeatedly having to provide the same underlying facts or circumstances to bring the latest live agent up to speed with the customer's situation.
As the cost of live agents may be significant, one method of improving the efficiency of the call center (while containing the cost of the live agents) is through techniques such as interactive voice response (IVR) technology, which can help offload some of the simpler tasks from live agents. With IVR, customer interactions are first broken down into a series of simple steps that may be delivered to a customer in an automated fashion, such as prerecorded scripts or multiple-choice menus on computer screens. This allows certain information (such as the nature of the problem, or an account number) to be obtained (for example, through a telephone keypad or a computer keyboard) before handing control over to a live agent.
Should, for example, the nature or complexity of the contact, or the customer request, an IVR interaction may need to be transferred (routed) to a live agent. For example, the IVR may pass control to a router, which may route the contact to a live agent (possibly based on information collected by the IVR script, such as to a live agent who specializes in the type of problem that the customer has selected from the choices provided). In addition, IVR may even handle simple calls for routine matters (such as a business' hours of operation) without engaging a live agent, so long as the customer's request falls into one of the choices of the simple menus of options provided.
IVR, however, does little to address the inherent limitations of live agents discussed above. In addition, customers tend to dislike IVR, whose impersonal approach requires a lot of repeating of information in both directions, frequently having to start from scratch, and often not reaching an acceptable solution. For example, customers find most IVR experiences unpleasant, usually because of being put on hold for an unreasonably long time (for example, waiting for a live agent), or having automated menus with too many options (and no one option really appropriate), and having to repeat the same information when trying to navigate the IVR menu in hopes of finding an acceptable path. In short, IVR is not a sufficient contact center solution for most customer concerns.